Hortense is north of Dickson and I had never heard of it until my colleague Leigh Ann Gardner brought it to my attention and we went looking for the place last week. Leigh Ann’s research found that it was originally a planned segregated community for blacks. In its day it had a depot, school, churches.

The Missionary Baptist church remains to mark the Hortense name.
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But the primary marker is the huge black cemetery behind the church, which the congregation is patiently clearing. Hortense is a neglected place in history but with a story worth exploring and a place and story worth celebrating.
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This one room school from the Great Depression era once stood on a country road near Nutbush. It served a generation of students, including a young girl who would become the Queen of Rock-n-Roll, Tina Turner. The Delta Heritage Center is now restoring this valuable building.

South of Bethpage, at the junction of Kansas Lane and Mt Zion Road is the Kansas Rosenwald School.

Built in 1923, with few changes since then, the Mt Zion church is keeping care of the school, which operated until c. 1962. The Center for Historic Preservation is working with the church and the community on a preservation plan.

Sneed Acres Farm on Old Smyrna Road in Brentwood has been known to me for about 20 years when Vance Little first emphasized the significance of the farms along the old road and then my graduate student Mary Allison Haynie conducted her county-wide survey of historic rock walls in Williamson County a few years later.

Yesterday, the family invited us to visit the property and to start discussions of its long overdue listing as a Tennessee Century Farm. As Mary Allison had reported the farm has a remarkable set of stone walls dividing the farm from the road but also dividing fields.

The barns are ingenious adaptations of earlier 19th century structures into the almost standardized look of Tennessee barns from the progressive era of the early twentieth century. Presently the farm fields livestock: swine, cattle, horses and rich pastures are everywhere.

The farmhouse too is an ingenious update of Tennessee’s Frontier Revival period in domestic architecture, finished in 1977. The earlier c. 1796 log house is exposed on the inside but the exterior has that more finished contemporary look of the revival.

The family cemetery is among the county’s oldest and contains slave burials and the graves of War of 1812 and Civil War veterans. We are just getting this new Center for Historic Preservation project underway, with the hard work coming this fall but certainly Sneed Acres Farm will be a distinguished addition to the Tennessee Century Farms program.

Two weeks ago, as Hollis Skinner and others introduced me to key heritage resources in Gibson County, we stopped at the Trenton Rosenwald School. Located where the Rosenwald Fund sop ported a new black school in the 1920s, the current building dates to the 1950s and 1960s.

Here is a category of buildings and a period of our history that need greater attention. Only when the end of Jim Crow segregation neared did Tennessee communities give more than lip service to the legal concept of separate but equal. Local African American communities took the new buildings, embraced them as community centers and continued their fight for civil rights. The clock was not going to be stopped or turned back.
The last photo is Dr Rachel Martin, the assistant director of the MTSU Center for historic Preservation speaking at a community gathering in the school gym,